James on Software

Safari is by far the best browser on OS X. It's fast, has an awesome UI, and just feels better integrated in to the Mac experience.

As former die-hard firefox users, though, I couldn't live without cmd-1 through cmd-9 for switching tabs. Thanks to Safari Commander, now, I don't have to!

For 5$, one person can use Safari Commander on as many of *their* computers as they like. Two members of the same family with separate computers should purchase two copies.

WARNING: REQUIRES SAFARI 4 BETA. Available for download here. So far, I've found it very stable and worth it for this extension alone.

Buy it at the giraffesoft store!

We at giraffesoft went over a year without even having a website. Then, we lasted a few months with a website, but no blog. That ends today, hopefully with something of a bang.

We're big believers in extracting functionality sooner rather than later. This practice has resulted in a ton of code that we use in all of our projects — nice and DRY.

Only problem is, we never get around to releasing this stuff. Starting a blog seemed like a good excuse to spend some time polishing up some code and, you know, writing READMEs.

So, starting today, we'll be releasing an open source project every day this week. They'll probably be mostly rails plugins. But, you never know. Something else might float in.

If you're interested in following along, subscribe to giraffesoft, the blog. Or, if like me, you don't really use your feed reader anymore, follow @giraffesoft on twitter or github! See you later with the first project.

Let's start with the biggest news. This has been a long time in the making. At Rubyfringe, Francois, Daniel, and I had a long conversation about how great it would be if we could work together.

We gave it a shot for Rails Rumble, in which we built what does this error mean. We won for most useful, which we took as a sign that our idea of working together was a good one.

I can't express how excited I am and privileged I feel to be working with François and Daniel. They are truly top notch in every way. Their contributions to open source, previous projects, and resumes speak for themselves.

If you don't know these amazing guys, you can read about François and Daniel on our new site!

The New giraffesoft.ca

Thanks to our good friends over at Arktyp and the awesome Webby framework, we finally have a real website. With plenty of work coming in over the last 14 months or so, I was having a really hard time motivating myself to put a full fledged site together.

Well, now that the team is growing, I finally got my shit together to finish up the site. I'm really excited to be able to show off some of our past projects and open source work. We've got a full range of services products and we're finishing up an app or two that you'll hear more about soon. So, check it out. It's awesome.

This is just the beginning. There'll be some more giraffesoft announcements soon, so stay tuned.

Mat has been a staple at Montreal on Rails since day one. Hanging out with him was always fun; we had a ton of interesting conversations. Whether we were discussing testing frameworks, or debating the latest raganwald post, chatting with Mat was always interesting, and fun. We hung out a lot at CUSEC, which is when Mat told me about his C# job — he wasn't... ummm.... loving it. That's when I started devising my plan to hire him, but alas, it wasn't time. Fast forward a couple of months, and finally, it is time!

But, enough about me, here are some fun facts about Mat.

• Mat is a language geek. His presentations at MoR have been about JRuby, and rubinius. He can often be found reading Steve Yegge, and Raganwald. Don't be surprised if Mat leaves GiraffeSoft at some point in the future to escape from "ruby hell" for the purity of lisp.
• Mat *really* loves testing. ...so much that at a former job where testing wasn't part of the culture, Mat wrote his code test first, and then trashed the tests when he checked in his code, since he wasn't allowed to check them in. He'll fit right in here :).

What Mat'll be Working On

As far as client work is concerned, Mat will be working on a couple of stealth mode projects that we'll hopefully be able to blog about in a couple of months. Client work, however, will only account for around 50% of Mat's time. So, what about the other half?

I'm going to try something totally crazy: 50% time. Yeah, that's right, fifty percent time, 5-0 — eat your heart out, google. Mat will have half his time to work on whatever he wants. He may use his time for blogging, working on Giraffetyp projects, open source, or developing some of his own ideas. Investing time and effort in some of my ideas, and open source projects has been a huge win for my skill set, and profile, and I'm taking a serious bet that it'll do the same for Mat.

So, Look Out

Mat has already proven himself to be a great blogger, and launched his first open source project. Nearly every article he's written over the last few months has been featured on programming reddit, hacker news, etc. His first open source project even got a shout outs from the github blog, and the rails envy podcast. Armed with ample time every week to work on that stuff, I'm betting Mat will become a prominent figure in the community in no time.

Here's what Mat has to Mat has to say about his move.

Everybody loves their iPod, and rightly so. It's one of the greatest technology products of all time. The iPod experience is the sum of many parts: design, development, etc. One of Apple's biggest strengths is their ability to put all of these pieces together effectively. If the iPod was ugly, unusable, had buggy software, or felt lousy in your hands, it wouldn't be the same device; it would be mediocre like all of the other portable mp3 players that came before and after it.

On the web, shops are usually run with a strong focus on one piece of the puzzle. Some firms are development-centric, others are design-centric, others still are business-centric. A shop's core skill usually trumps everything else. Even when they hire consultants to fill the gaps in their skill set, shops tend to keep focused on their core competencies, failing to properly execute the work of the consultants. It seems to happen everywhere — even in the best shops.

So, having the best people work on the product isn't enough; to achieve greatness, there has to be tight collaboration between all parts. The developers must respect and understand the designers, and likewise. Most importantly, no one concern can trump another.

Come read the rest of this article at the Giraffetyp blog. Note: I'm going to be doing a lot of my blogging over there for the next little while, so, please subscribe there too.

I've posted this in a few places, and gotten some great responses. I don't know why I didn't think of posting it here earlier. (Of course, I give preference to anybody who reads my blog :)). Our little job blurb looks like this:

GiraffeSoft is looking to add an awesome rails developer to our team. If you live and breathe ruby & rails, are test(or spec)-obsessed (this one is absolutely 100% critical), want to work on a team that is actually agile, and get paid to work on our open-source projects (and maybe some of your own), we want to talk to you. We work from home, so, self-motivation, and management skills are critical. Where you are, and when you do the work, however, are not, so long as things get done on time. It will start out as a contract position, with the potential to become full-time down the line. If you're interested, send a short note, resume, and code samples to noticeme at giraffesoft dot ca.

Looking forward to hearing from you.